Canton Timken workers overwhelmingly adopt new contract; $225 million expansion on the way

Canton RepositoryUnion members voted Tuesday at the Mayfield Senior Center.

CANTON, Ohio -- Timken workers overwhelmingly approved a contract Tuesday with the industrial equipment maker, clearing the way for a $225 million expansion of a steel plant.

After rejecting a similar deal last month, United Steelworkers Local 1123 approved the new contract, 1,520-260. The new contract runs through 2017.

"It's better than the last one," said Leroy Sword, a newly hired worker.

Both contract offers included wage increases and bonuses. However, officials with United Steelworkers Local 1123 in Canton said the wage and benefits gap between new hires and older workers was too large in the first contract.

After workers rejected that contract, the union and the company made some changes to the tentative deal, including a provision that would raise wages of new hires to the levels of their older peers in two years instead of three.

"We still have to pay for our own insurance, and the older guys don't have to, but it's a step in the right direction," Sword said.

Timken has said winning a new labor deal is the last critical step toward the company's approval of an expansion to its Faircrest Steel Plant, a facility it built in the 1980s. Workers from that plant and two other Canton-area steel plants voted Tuesday. The Steelworkers local union represents about 2,300 workers.

Several workers said they voted against the first contract in January because they felt the company could offer more, especially to its lower-paid new hires.

Mike Simon, a 33-year veteran of Timken's steel plants, said that he voted against the deal in January but that he supported this one because the company and the union did a better job of explaining what was at stake.

Timken has gotten the bulk of its profits over the past year from its steel division. The company's three mills near Canton make highly engineered alloys needed for specialty equipment, not bulk steel used in car doors or dishwasher bodies.Timken has said demand for its specialty alloys is growing, and it had already made several smaller investments in its Canton-area plants to boost production. Still, it said it needed the $225 million upgrade at the Faircrest plant to meet its growth targets.

When it reached its second tentative agreement with the union earlier this month, the company said it was its final offer. Workers had expected that if they rejected this contract, the company would add more steel capacity at its plants in other countries.

Simon said he rejected the first deal because he was worried about contract terms that called for 80 percent of the employment from Timken's plant expansion to come from active workers. He took that to mean that 20 percent would be lower-wage new hires, meaning there would be little job security or room for advancement for senior workers.

"I talked to some of the guys who were around when Faircrest opened, and they said they used the same language back then. But it still worked out for the best for us," Simon said.

Sheldon Kennedy, a 17-year employee at Timken's Gambrinus plant, said he voted no in January and voted no again on Tuesday.

"If we keep approving deals like this, I don't think we'll ever get" rid of the two-tier system that allows Timken to provide less generous wages and benefits to new hires, Kennedy said.

Other workers said that although they don't like the two-tier worker system, they approved the contract because of the job security it could offer. In December, the state approved a $19.5 million tax abatement package for Timken. To keep those tax breaks, it would have to keep the bulk of its workers at Faircrest for 15 years.

"The company investing money and the company doing well is good for us. It keeps our jobs here," said Kyle Stein, who has worked at the Faircrest plant for four years. "Job security is probably the most important thing we can have right now."

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